The United States has become increasingly urban since its formal inception in 1776. Washington D.C. in 2000 was 100% urban while Vermont was only 38.2%.
There were two key pieces of legislation that made the development of today's interstate and road system what it is today. The 1925 and 1956 Federal Highway Acts. These acts facilitated the federal control, organization, and funding of nation-wide road development. Prior to these acts many roads were impassable, or very poorly maintained.
A nationally coordinated numbering system was put into place and after 1956, billions of dollars was earmarked to fund the asphalt and concrete paving of a new highway system. Today, we have over 4 million miles of roads that require tens of billions per year in construction and maintenance costs. You can also guess that car ownership has increased dramatically once the roads were built.
The number of cars owned tripled between 1960 and 2000 and these cars facilitated the commuting trends into the suburbs. The availability of the internet facilitated working from home and telecommuting. For the wealthy elite, gentrification and exurbanization was made possible by abandoned factories and apartment buildings, now desirable for purchase and renovation by the upper-middle class young couples.
Gentrification is the purchase of rundown buildings in the city center which were remodeled for upper class apartments.
Exurbanization is where upper class city dwellers moved out of the city beyond the suburbs and lived in high-end housing in the countryside.
By the 1980s, many empty warehouses and many abandoned apartment buildings scarred certain sections of the city. Wealthy young couples began a trend called gentrification. Inevitably, gentrification forced the poor inner city dwellers out of their neighborhoods, because city officials were persuaded to rezone these gentrified neighborhoods to keep the "undesirable elements" away.
The modern U.S. urban experience has followed a semi-circular pattern in the last 150 years, following this pattern:
Why live in a city in the first place? Cities and rural areas have both push and pull factors. Push factors out of a rural area might include:
Not enough jobs or food in rural area; there are not enough opportunities; almost everyone is poor in rural areas; there are often severe taxes in rural areas.
In general over the last 100 years, the rural economy provides fewer and fewer opportunities, services, and culturally-desirable experiences in comparison to an urban one.
Pull factors to a city might include:
There are more opportunities and job possibilities; reunite with friends; access to more people and more cultural experiences.
People are literally pulled to the urban and suburban areas because the city offers more of these unmet needs. The Industrial Revolution brought many workers to live in and around the urban areas. Factories and inner-city concentrated housing units were very common up until World War II. By the end of the war, people wanted their own homes, independence, and a daily reprieve from the grind of the big city. They didn't want to move too far away, just far enough to allow them a less hectic daily life with a more affordable cost of living. The suburbs came at a perfect time.
Suburban refers to smaller cities located on the edges of a larger city which often include residential neighborhoods for those working in the area.
The development of suburbs in the U.S. grew dramatically after World War II. When the superhighways and freeways combined with the somewhat modest cost of automobiles, the movement out of the inner city and into the suburbs was on. Read more about the development of suburbs in the post-war period:
